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Cognition and Perception

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Articles 301 - 330 of 467

Full-Text Articles in Cognitive Neuroscience

Mental Representations Are Not Necessary For Fish Consciousness, Luis H. Favela Jan 2017

Mental Representations Are Not Necessary For Fish Consciousness, Luis H. Favela

Animal Sentience

Woodruff (2017) argues that teleost fishes are capable of phenomenal consciousness. Central to his argument is the assumption that phenomenal consciousness is representational in nature. I think the commitment to a representational theory of consciousness undermines Woodruff’s case for teleost phenomenal consciousness. The reason is that organisms do not need to perceive the world indirectly via mental images/representations in order to have phenomenological experiences. My argument is based on considerations of ecological psychology and comparative ethology.


Animal Models, Agendas And Sentience, Thomas Creson Jan 2017

Animal Models, Agendas And Sentience, Thomas Creson

Animal Sentience

Woodruff’s target article on teleost consciousness is a well-organized logical argument for considering the fish as a sentient being. This becomes more important for animal ethical discussion as the fish becomes a more important and legitimate animal model for investigating animal states and traits associated with higher levels of behavior such as learning and memory.


The Emotional Brain Of Fish, Sonia Rey Planellas Jan 2017

The Emotional Brain Of Fish, Sonia Rey Planellas

Animal Sentience

Woodruff (2017) analyzes structural homologies and functional equivalences between the brains of mammals and fish to understand where sentience and social cognition might reside in teleosts. He compares neuroanatomical, neurophysiological and behavioural correlates. I discuss current advances in the study of fish cognitive abilities and emotions, and advocate an evolutionary approach to the underlying basis of sentience in teleosts.


Fish Sentience: A Hypothesis Worth Pursuing, José E. Burgos Jan 2017

Fish Sentience: A Hypothesis Worth Pursuing, José E. Burgos

Animal Sentience

Woodruff’s case for fish sentience is intriguing. Though far from ready for final acceptance, it is worth pursuing. The case is philosophically uncontroversial under functionalism and reductive materialism. It is also highly heuristic, as it raises interesting issues for further investigation, such as the neural causation of behavior, the role of Mauthner cells in conditioned avoidance, and whether operant conditioning is constitutive of fish sentience.


We Still Need A Theory, Paula Droege Jan 2017

We Still Need A Theory, Paula Droege

Animal Sentience

Woodruff (2017) has compiled a convincing array of data to support his contention that teleost fish feel pain. However, in the absence of an explanatory theory about the nature and function of consciousness, a checklist of criteria is insufficient to allay skeptical concerns. I offer a theory that can explain why features like selective attention and behavioral flexibility indicate consciousness. Consciousness represents the present moment in order to allow dynamic changes in actions or goals in response to situational demands.


Similar Anatomy Does Not Imply Comparable Function, Jay R. Stauffer Jr. Jan 2017

Similar Anatomy Does Not Imply Comparable Function, Jay R. Stauffer Jr.

Animal Sentience

Woodruff concludes that ray-finned fishes (Actinopterygii) are sentient and that the pallium contributes to sentience in these fishes. He gives a detailed description of the pallium; however, he assumes that similar structures in fishes and tetrapods support similar behaviors, capabilities, and functions. I reject the premise that similarities in structure imply similarities in function. The fact that a selected species of fish may exhibit behaviors, reactions, and/or anatomy suggestive of sentience does not necessarily generalize to all teleosts.


Dogs Consciously Experience Emotions: The Question Is, Which?, Ralph Adolphs Jan 2017

Dogs Consciously Experience Emotions: The Question Is, Which?, Ralph Adolphs

Animal Sentience

I discuss three themes related to Kujala’s target article. First, the wealth of emerging data on cognitive studies in dogs will surely show that dogs have a very rich repertoire of cognitive processes, for most of which we find homologues in humans. Second, understanding the internal states that mediate social behaviors, such as emotions, requires us to consider both a dog’s behaviors with other dogs, and the emergence of new behavioral patterns in interaction with humans. Third, all of this will certainly narrow the range of justifications for denying that dogs have subjective experiences of emotions.


Emotion In Dogs: Translational And Transformative Aspects, Silvan R. Urfer Jan 2017

Emotion In Dogs: Translational And Transformative Aspects, Silvan R. Urfer

Animal Sentience

Kujala (2017) provides an excellent overview of most aspects of emotion in dogs; however, she does not cover a few fields of research that I think are also relevant to the topic. In this commentary, I discuss the current state of our knowledge regarding cognitive decline and behavioral disorders in dogs as potential models for human neurodegenerative disease and mental illness; how emotion and cognition in dogs interact with sex, gonadectomy, and sexual behavior; as well as the transformative potential of functional MRI imaging of the conscious dog brain in the study of comparative neurophysiology.


Direct Perception Of Animal Mind, Paul Morris Jan 2017

Direct Perception Of Animal Mind, Paul Morris

Animal Sentience

Kujala’s (2017) target article is ostensibly focused on how everyday folk (fail to) make sense of canine emotions. However, the theories outlined in the article apply to making sense of all aspects of the mentality of both human and non-human animals. The target article neglects the fundamental arguments surrounding the problem of other minds. I explore the relevant arguments and briefly review approaches suggesting that our everyday-life sense that both human and non-human animals are thinking, feeling, emotional beings has a secure epistemological basis.


Canine Emotions And The Bond Between Humans And Dogs, Robert G. Franklin Jr. Jan 2017

Canine Emotions And The Bond Between Humans And Dogs, Robert G. Franklin Jr.

Animal Sentience

I explore how the findings reviewed by Kujala (2017) influence our understanding of the human-dog bond. The special social cognitive abilities of dogs may be unique among animal species, probably influenced by the circumstances surrounding canine domestication. The bond has influenced animal welfare policies, giving dogs a privileged place among animals. To determine what protections other species should have in a rational animal welfare policy, more research is needed on whether other species have similar social cognitive abilities.


Communicating Canine And Human Emotions, Juliane Bräuer, Karine Silva, Stefan R. Schweinberger Jan 2017

Communicating Canine And Human Emotions, Juliane Bräuer, Karine Silva, Stefan R. Schweinberger

Animal Sentience

Kujala (2017) reviews a topic of major relevance for the understanding of the special dog-human relationship: canine emotions (as seen through human social cognition). This commentary draws attention to the communication of emotions within such a particular social context. It highlights challenges that need to be tackled to further advance research on emotional communication, and it calls for new avenues of research. Efforts to disentangle emotional processes from cognitive functioning might be necessary to better comprehend how they contribute, alone and/or in combination, to the communication of emotions. Also, new research methods need to be developed to account for the …


Do We Understand What It Means For Dogs To Experience Emotion?, Lasana T. Harris Jan 2017

Do We Understand What It Means For Dogs To Experience Emotion?, Lasana T. Harris

Animal Sentience

Psychologists who study humans struggle to agree on a definition of emotion, falling primarily into two camps. Though recent neuroscience advances are beginning to settle this ancient debate, it cannot solve the private-language problem at the heart of inferences about social cognition. This suggests that when we consider the emotional experiences of other species like canines, biological and physiological homologs do not provide enough evidence of emotional experiences similar to those of humans. Secondary complex emotional experiences are even more difficult to attribute to non-humans since such experiences rely, by definition, on social cognition. Given the contextual differences between human-human …


The Development And Expression Of Canine Emotion, Allison L. Martin Jan 2017

The Development And Expression Of Canine Emotion, Allison L. Martin

Animal Sentience

In her review of canine emotions, Kujala (2017) discusses how humans often attribute emotions such as fear, love, and jealousy to their canine companions. This attribution is often dismissed as anthropomorphism, suggesting that only humans can possess these emotions. I argue that emotions are not something we possess but features of certain behavioral patterns. Both human and canine emotions arise through evolution and conditioning; examining their development and expression may lead to new insights about both canine and human behavior.


Beyond The Provable?, Márta Gácsi Jan 2017

Beyond The Provable?, Márta Gácsi

Animal Sentience

Reading Kujala’s (2017) target article, I wondered whether we really need to approach the issue of animals’ emotions the traditional way, asking whether animals have emotions that are identical, similar or precursors to those of humans. As an ethologist, I prefer to examine psychological phenomena from an evolutionary perspective, focusing on Tinbergen’s (1963) four questions (Bateson & Laland 2013).


Studying Dog Emotion Beyond Expression And Without Concern For Feeling, Peter F. Cook Jan 2017

Studying Dog Emotion Beyond Expression And Without Concern For Feeling, Peter F. Cook

Animal Sentience

Studies of dog emotion have focused on the expression of social emotion, either because this is taken to suggest human-like feeling states in dogs or because it has been the most accessible signal of dog emotional processing. I argue for an approach grounded in affective neuroscience, relying on direct measures of physiology across different contexts. This work may be particularly fertile in exploring social emotion in the dog, not because dogs necessarily share human emotional states, but because they are unique in having likely evolved to fit a human social niche.


Inferring Emotion Without Language: Comparing Canines And Prelinguistic Infants, Stefanie Hoehl Jan 2017

Inferring Emotion Without Language: Comparing Canines And Prelinguistic Infants, Stefanie Hoehl

Animal Sentience

Research on canine emotions has to deal with challenges quite similar to psychological research on social and emotional development in human infants. In both cases, verbal reports are unattainable, and behavioral and physiological methods have to be adjusted to the specific population. I will argue that both regarding empirical approaches and conceptual work, advances in research on social-cognitive development in human infants can inform the study of canine emotions.


Positive Emotions And Quality Of Life In Dogs, Patrizia Piotti Jan 2017

Positive Emotions And Quality Of Life In Dogs, Patrizia Piotti

Animal Sentience

Positive affect is fundamental to ensuring good animal welfare. Discrete and dimensional theories of emotion have recently been used to explore the relation between cognition and affect and to develop cognitive measures of positive affect. Human quality-of-life assessment focuses on positive affect, which is difficult to measure objectively in dogs. Expanding on Kujala’s (2017) discussion of positive emotions and cognitive measures of affect, I suggest how these are relevant to assessing canine quality of life.


Raising The Moral Consciousness Of Science, Bernard Rollin Jan 2017

Raising The Moral Consciousness Of Science, Bernard Rollin

Animal Sentience

Precaution on behalf of sentient animals should not be tempered by the questionable principle of the amorality of science.


Support For The Precautionary Principle, Jennifer Mather Jan 2017

Support For The Precautionary Principle, Jennifer Mather

Animal Sentience

The precautionary principle gives the animal the benefit of the doubt when its sentient status is not known. This is necessary for advanced invertebrates such as cephalopods because research and evidence concerning the criteria for sentience are scattered and often insufficient to give us the background for the decision.


What Harmful Practices? The Material Scope Of Animal Protection Legislation, Eze Paez Jan 2017

What Harmful Practices? The Material Scope Of Animal Protection Legislation, Eze Paez

Animal Sentience

Jonathan Birch proposes a criterion for the subjective scope of animal protection legislation. He says nothing about its material scope: which harmful practices it should regulate. I argue, first, that most moral views would agree that the worst forms of animal exploitation should be legally forbidden, even if there will inevitably be disagreement about some cases of animal experimentation. I also argue that, when feasible, there should be legal provisions to help wild animals.


Assessing Negative And Positive Evidence For Animal Pain, Robert W. Elwood Jan 2017

Assessing Negative And Positive Evidence For Animal Pain, Robert W. Elwood

Animal Sentience

Jonathan Birch suggests that we should take one well-conducted study that produces results consistent with the idea of pain as being sufficient to invoke the animal sentience precautionary principle. Here, I consider how to balance negative and positive results from such studies using examples from my own work. I also consider which criteria of pain might provide strong inference about pain and which may prove to be weaker.


Considering Side Biases In Vigilance And Fear, Lesley J. Rogers Jan 2017

Considering Side Biases In Vigilance And Fear, Lesley J. Rogers

Animal Sentience

Measures of vigilance and fear might be more consistently associated if side biases are taken into account, because the right side of the brain is specialised to detect predators and to express fear responses. In species with eyes positioned laterally and with relatively small binocular fields, this brain asymmetry is manifested as eye preferences because each eye sends most of its input to be processed in the opposite side of the brain. Hence, responses elicited by stimuli on the animal’s left side are more likely be associated with fear than are responses to the same stimuli on the animal’s right …


To Identify All The Relevant Factors Is To Explain Feeling, Arthur S. Reber Jan 2017

To Identify All The Relevant Factors Is To Explain Feeling, Arthur S. Reber

Animal Sentience

Several additional comments on Reber (2016a) have appeared. Like those addressed in Reber (2016b), they reflect points of agreement and disagreement on various elements of my Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC) model. Some, however, seem to have missed key points. I'm willing to take some responsibility for this. Perhaps I was not clear about some of the more radical points of the model. Hopefully the case-by-case review here will help.


Consciousness Is Not Inherent In But Emergent From Life, Jon Mallatt, Todd E. Feinberg Jan 2017

Consciousness Is Not Inherent In But Emergent From Life, Jon Mallatt, Todd E. Feinberg

Animal Sentience

Reber’s theory of the cellular basis of consciousness (CBC) is right to emphasize that we should study consciousness (sentience) in its simplest form, taking its evolution into account. However, not enough evidence is presented to support CBC’s unorthodox claim that even simple, one-celled organisms are conscious. As pointed out by other commentators, the CBC seems to be based on outdated ideas about evolution and does not acknowledge that consciousness could be an evolutionary novel feature. Such emergent features are abundant in living organisms. We review our own emergentist solution, in which consciousness evolved in the elaborating nervous systems of the …


What Can Research On Nonhumans Tell Us About Human Dissonance?, Jennifer Vonk Jan 2017

What Can Research On Nonhumans Tell Us About Human Dissonance?, Jennifer Vonk

Animal Sentience

Zentall’s thoughtful review of the literature on cognitive dissonance in nonhumans helps to highlight the common finding that similar outcomes in humans and nonhumans can be attributed to different underlying mechanisms. I advocate a more fully comparative approach to the underlying mechanisms, avoiding the assumption of shared processes in humans and nonhumans.


Choice-Induced Preference: A Challenge For Contrast, Benjamin R. Eisenreich, Benjamin Y. Hayden Jan 2017

Choice-Induced Preference: A Challenge For Contrast, Benjamin R. Eisenreich, Benjamin Y. Hayden

Animal Sentience

In his target article, Zentall asks: “to experience cognitive dissonance is it necessary for one to have conflicting beliefs or even beliefs at all?” He then argues that a simple behavioral process, the Within Trial Contrast Effect, may be sufficient to explain observed cognitive dissonance effects in nonhuman animals and possibly humans as well. We agree with Zentall that this effect is sufficient to explain many reported cognitive dissonance effects in nonhuman animals, but question its sufficiency for primate behavior (both monkeys and humans).


Dissonance Reduction In Nonhuman Animals: Implications For Cognitive Dissonance Theory, Cindy Harmon-Jones, Nick Haslam, Brock Bastian Jan 2017

Dissonance Reduction In Nonhuman Animals: Implications For Cognitive Dissonance Theory, Cindy Harmon-Jones, Nick Haslam, Brock Bastian

Animal Sentience

We review the evidence for dissonance reduction in nonhuman animals and examine the alternative explanations for these effects. If nonhuman animals engage in dissonance reduction, this supports the original theory as proposed by Festinger (1957) over the revisions to the theory that focused on the self-concept. Evidence of animal sentience, including dissonance reduction, may be a source of cognitive dissonance.


Clarifying Concepts In Cognitive Dissonance Theory, Eddie Harmon-Jones Jan 2017

Clarifying Concepts In Cognitive Dissonance Theory, Eddie Harmon-Jones

Animal Sentience

This commentary on Zentall’s target article focuses primarily on clarifying some postulates and variables in cognitive dissonance theory. I discuss the adaptive motivational functions of dissonance arousal and dissonance reduction, and attempt to clarify some past dissonance experiments and to tease apart a dissonance theory and contrast explanation of effort-justification-type effects. The evidence and arguments reviewed here support the explanatory power of cognitive dissonance theory in a wide variety of circumstances in human and nonhuman animals, but they depend on first defining concepts such as “cognitions” quite broadly, as Festinger did when he originally proposed the theory.


Cognitive Dissonance Or Contrast? It Could Be Both, Thomas Zentall Jan 2017

Cognitive Dissonance Or Contrast? It Could Be Both, Thomas Zentall

Animal Sentience

My target article suggested that cognitive dissonance may be accounted for by a simpler mechanism: contrast. Whether contrast can explain all cognitive dissonance effects is an empirical question, but it is always useful to try to distinguish simpler mechanisms from more complex cognitive ones. The insistence that cognitive dissonance is a human-only process quite different from contrast may be a self-serving means of justifying the exploitation of animals.


Cognitive Continuity In Cognitive Dissonance, David R. Brodbeck, Madeleine I. R. Brodbeck Jan 2017

Cognitive Continuity In Cognitive Dissonance, David R. Brodbeck, Madeleine I. R. Brodbeck

Animal Sentience

Zentall’s (2016) model of cognitive dissonance is compatible with cognitive continuity between humans and nonhumans. It may help explain cognitive dissonance-like behavior in many species, including humans. It is also consistent with Tinbergen’s (1963) ‘four whys’ in ethological explanation.